My FT2DE has sent out today unfortunately several old and therefore misleading SOTA spots again - it did that by itself without a possibility for the operator to stop or prevent or recognize that before. Please apologize for any inconvenience caused. I was on FL/VO-029, 089 and 031 in the Gérardmer region today.
I have to do research on that when back at home. I estimate APRS2SOTA in general, but this here is an absolute nonsense. I won’t use it at present until this is cleared. Maybe a specific attribute needs to be switched.
The Vosges region is a beautiful peace of landscape. WX has not been very favorable up to now, but we’ve had some lucky hours without rain. Contrary to Mariusz’ SOTAwatch spot I’m not a ghost but really real here, hi.
I’ve had the same experience a couple of times. I now keep only a “dummy” spotting message that I edit with new summit and frequency information when I want to spot myself, but I have it addressed to SPTA so that it won’t be picked up by aprs2sota. I delete the true spotting message soon after I know it’s made it onto the website.
It seems that I would receive an acknowledgment message via aprs2sota more often in the past. I haven’t received any in a while.
That’s exactly what I experienced with my Kenwood TH-D72! I think the problem is, when you only have a RX I-Gate in your range your sent out message/spot is correctly gated to SOTAwatch.
If you receive the message by APRS2SOTA your device will answer by:
So if your handheld is not receiving an answer message it tries to send the message a few times (5 times on my Kenwood).
To prevent that unwanted messages beeing sent out I keep two “dummy” messages on my TH-D72 and edit it with the correct information. One for VHF FM and one for HF SSB. These look like:
OE/OO-000 07118 SSB OE5REO/P
OE/OO-000 145500 FM OE5REO/P
After sending out the edited message to APRS2SOTA I just put the handheld away and leave it running for a few minutes on the APRS frequency. Then I delete all new messages that are in the list … only keeping the two “dummy” messages for the next summit. So far that worked fine for me.
Thanks for your interesting and probably useful (even for me) explanations. Is there an APRS expert here who can explain what APRS really does here? It seems ordinary behaviour since others face same/similar problems, but it would help if somebody could name the problem in words that I can understand and tell us the official way to get rid of that lived nonsense.
I like APRS2SOTA (and therefore APRS), but the system is from another century for me, hi - like old style SMS on old style cell phones.
Okay, this should now be sorted out on my APRS device FT2DE, doing soon some field tests with a cleaned-up message list. Thanks again, especially to Martin, @OE5REO – this here was more efficient than reading carefully the manual, hi.
The APRS manual for the Yaesu FT1D/XD page 43 lists : 5 message transmission attempts at 1 minute retry intervals. So about 4 minutes (4 retries) total before the FT1 gives up sending a message without receiving a corresponding Ack.
Other APRS implementations (radio/TNC/APP/etc) may use other retry intervals and maximum retry values.
Re to: “Contrary to Mariusz’ SOTAwatch spot I’m not a ghost but really real here, hi.”
Hi
I have not read this before and I think it refers to what I typed in the spot. (in my log everything is OK)
I do not doubt that you were there, and I used the word “ghost” it was only referring to the signal strength!
Unfortunately, at home I have a high level of noise and sometimes these connections are like ghosts. I know more how I hear …
Regards
Mariusz sp9amh (also for many “ghost” because always QRP)
Thanks for coming back on this, and I did understand it in the sense you’ve written above, hi. The word “ghost” was somehow real for me in that moment, since there was a mysterious atmosphere in this forest. A real ghost would not have surprised me!
I am aware of your QTH situation, and I enjoy to answer your calls, as long as I can hear them (and vice versa). So until next time!
